


we'll burn like fireflies

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Angst, Bonding, Bruce Feels, Canonical Character Death, Children, Class Issues, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death, Origin Story, Orphans, Pearls and Blood, Protective Jason, Red Hoodies, Trauma, Trauma Bonding, murder vs. justifiable homicide, some asshole cops, the problem of Alfred, why is that a canonical tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 12:15:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6116152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gun rose again. It was still shaking but shaking hadn’t stopped it from killing Mom and Dad. “I said stop <em>looking</em> at me like that!”</p><p>They stood frozen there in an eternal instant, where maybe the man with the gun would pull the trigger one more time, to make those accusing eyes close forever and give him a bloodier soul but a cleaner escape, or maybe he’d just turn and run, with his paltry half-dozen pearls, run away from his failure and his crime.</p><p>In either world, Bruce wouldn’t look away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i am vengeance

**Author's Note:**

> The working title of this fic was 'the one where Bruce and Jason are the same age,' which kind of ignores the plot. Also I think I've made Jason roughly ten months older, which is a fairly big deal when you're eight. 
> 
> (As to the year, Bruce originally would have been eight during the Gilded Age, and now would have been eight in the early 80s. Aka, Jason's original native era! Yay comic book time! There's a definite historical similarity between the two periods in terms of unsustainable economic booms.)
> 
> See foot for warnings.

In Gotham, in a year when America’s strength and wealth seemed like it could grow forever even as the rot had already set in, there was a narrow alley that opened off Park Row.

Actually there were several, and their dimness and filth had begun to multiply as the neighborhood slid toward decay, but at the moment we are concerned with just one of them, a moderately shadowy corridor a block and a half from a still-popular theater. Inside there were a row of slightly dented garbage cans, and behind them a heap of paper and cardboard rubbish, and over its mouth there stood a street lamp, casting a pool of light onto the sidewalk where two people lay dead who, seconds ago, had been amongst the living.

Their blood spread under scattered pearls, and their killer stood just outside the circle of light. The hand that had torn the necklace tightened, and the hand that had fired the gun—once, _twice_ , and twice cannot be called an accident—trembled.

The small survivor stood over the dead, and he did not tremble.

The boy had blue eyes, his mother’s cheekbones and his father’s stubborn chin. His name, as you very well know, was Bruce. His blue eyes had been shock-wide in the first seconds, as his parents collapsed and his world crashed down, but now they were flat. They drilled into the man with the gun. There was no fear. There was barely even anger, yet.

“Stop lookin’ at me like that, kid,” the murderer whispered.

Bruce didn’t know what _like that_ was but he didn’t care, he would look _however he wanted_ , and his thumbs felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets he was squeezing so hard, and he looked at the man _harder_.

The gun rose again. It was still shaking but shaking hadn’t stopped it from killing Mom and Dad. ( _They were dead theyweredead **they were DEAD.**_ ) Bruce still didn’t look away. “I said stop _looking_ at me like that!”

They stood frozen there in an eternal instant, where maybe the man with the gun would pull the trigger one more time, to make those accusing eyes close forever and give him a bloodier soul but a cleaner escape, or maybe he’d just turn and run, with his paltry half-dozen pearls, run away from his failure and his crime.

In either world, Bruce wouldn’t look away.

And then, when it seemed like the moment had to break or it would kill them both with its own weight, _something_ burst out of the mess of boxes and loose trash. Bruce caught a confused flash of red limned with white as the _something_ lunged, launching itself from the steel lid of the garbage can right behind the killer with a _gonnnngg!_ sound that was still in the air as the _something_ hit the gunman’s back, clung there, made him stagger.

They scrabbled briefly, panicked killer and mystery garbage thing—the hand holding the gun, flung up in alarm and the main target of the thing’s assault—another shot rang out, and shattered the lonely, flickering street light.

In the last moments before the dark fell, as the sounds of gunshot and glass and the last reverberations from the trash can all piled atop one another until noise became so total it was almost like silence, Bruce saw the gun’s muzzle drop toward him again, and the red-and-white Something jerk a limb across the mugger’s throat.

In the following dark, he heard another body hit the ground.

He’d only heard that sound twice before, but he already knew he would never mistake it for anything else ever again.

His parent’s murderer was dead.

He stood in the dark, with new blood joining the pool of his mother’s and father’s around his feet, and he still wasn’t afraid at all. The worst the Something could do was kill him, right? And at least now he knew _that man_ wouldn’t get away.

“Hey, kid?” said a husky voice out of the darkness. “You okay?”

The Something…sounded like a City kid. Bruce felt a faint frown pull at his face, realized it was the first expression he had made since—since.

“Fuck, don’t tell me he shot you anyway. C’mon. Talk to me.”

Bruce wasn’t sure how.

There was a small scraping sound, and a match burst into life. The Something _was_ a city kid, no taller than him, in a hoodie that was way too big, and Bruce’s eyes caught with the light on the red-stained blade in the boy’s other hand. Then they flickered down to the crumpled shadow that had been his enemy.

“You killed him,” he said.

“Yeah, well.” Knife boy hunched his shoulders a little, seemed to try to tuck the knife out of sight behind him, then winced as the match burned down to lick his fingertips, and dropped it. The match-end snuffed out in the puddled blood, and for a second the gloom was full of the weirdly prosaic sound of Knife-boy blowing on the scorched ends of his fingers. Sulkily his voice came from the alley that seemed darker than ever: “He was gonna kill you. You could say thank you.”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t realized Red-And-White Something had stopped the man from killing him, but he hadn’t thought about it as _saved_ until the boy asked for thanks, and he felt the rage sink its hooks back into him. Jerked his head up, even though it wouldn’t really show with only the light of distant signs and the glow of the sky, and snarled, “Why couldn’t you have killed him _sooner?_ ” Because what did he care about being saved, when Mom and Dad and his whole world was dead?

“First gunshot woke me up,” the other kid answered, through his teeth, too. “Guess I should’ve gone ahead and done the smart thing, not got involved, huh? I’m not your killing dog, you snotty little bastard.”

“No,” Bruce blurted. (Later, he would realize this chagrin was the first thing he had felt since his parent’s deaths that had not been _about_ those deaths.) “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

It felt sort of like thanking someone for a Christmas present you hadn’t wanted, like the BB M16 one of his Kane aunts had gotten him last year, but maybe he’d change his mind someday. When he was little he thought books were an awful present. Except the ones Mom read to him, over and over. He was too big for that now, but sometimes…sometimes she still….

(Dad used to do funny voices, when he got home in time to read a bedtime story.)

“S’okay,” said the boy. He sounded kind of embarrassed, too. “I mean, you’re having a really shitty day.” He moved forward, feet making a little sticky scraping sound on the bloodied concrete.

“Yeah,” Bruce whispered. Mom and Dad would have been unhappy about the swearing, but he couldn’t come up with any way to describe today that he liked better. “Really…shitty.”

“Oh my God you don’t need to make my understatement sound that dumb.” The boy snorted a little, and stopped walking.

Bruce’s eyes had gotten used to the dark, a little, and he could make out a sort of outline, dark grey on grey. The other boy could probably see him better, since even with the streetlamp out there was more light coming in the mouth of the alley than there was from inside. He was taller, maybe older than Bruce, but not a lot.

He struck another match, and used the light to maneuver himself around the bodies, around…

He didn’t feel like he _could_ cry right now, but he thought if he did he would never, ever stop.

Anyway, his _mother and father_. The boy from the garbage was being careful not to step on them, or even over them.

Once he was safely on Bruce’s side of them, he blew out the stub of the match before that one could burn him, too, and didn’t light another.

“Look, kid,” he said, and Bruce couldn’t even get annoyed about being called _kid_ , “we should get away from here. Bad people come to the sound of gunshots, sometimes. Looking for scraps.”

He shook his head. “I can’t leave them,” he said.

The other boy was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “okay. Yeah, okay, that’s. We’ll stay here, then.”

Bruce nodded, and slowly sank down onto his knees. Reached out, tentatively, because being able to see where the bodies lay wasn’t the same as being able to _see_ them, and his fingers brushed through his mother’s hair before landing on her shoulder, fashionably bare.

He jerked back from the already-growing-cold clamminess of it, and didn’t reach out toward Dad. Drew in a sharp breath as a warm, solid hand landed on the back of his neck. “I know,” whispered the other boy, like he was telling a secret, as he squatted down next to Bruce. (And Bruce wanted to tell him to get out of it, get back, they were _his_ parents and it was _his_ blood to stand in. Only some of the blood was the gunman’s, and the other boy had killed him, so he had a right to get his blood on him. He guessed.) “My mom was the same. It’s real. Sorry.”

Bruce swallowed, slowly let his fingers sink until they touched blood. That had cooled, too. His head hung. _Mom,_ he said, but he didn’t use his voice. “Dad,” he whispered. Because his father was further away, only that didn’t make sense.

His pinkie finger brushed something that rolled, and he recoiled again before realizing it was a pearl. He wondered if pearls could get stained. He picked it up.

It was hard, searching for pearls in the dark without touching the bodies. He kept brushing against his mother’s hair, kept realizing he was trying to move hushedly, like they were asleep and he might _wake_ them. (If only, if only.) The warm presence of the other boy crouched just a little way away on his left side kept him awake, kept him from locking out the world and staring, but that meant he needed something, something to distract him, and shoving all his mother’s bloodied pearls into his flat tuxedo-jacket pockets one by one seemed _necessary_ , somehow. After a while, he noticed he was shivering.

The other boy noticed around the same time. Stood up, contorted for a few seconds, and then dumped his too-large sweatshirt on Bruce’s head. It flopped over his still-almost-useless vision, smelling of dirty boy and garbage but _not_ —this was important—of blood, and Bruce almost didn’t want to remove it. Couldn’t, he realized, without getting it bloody, because the cold-slimy-wet had seeped up through his shirt cuffs now and would smear all over anything he touched. He shook his head, instead, carefully, to make the thing slide to one side, so he could look up and say, “No, I can’t. It’s yours, it’s—I’ll just get blood on it.” And if he put it on, he couldn’t reach his tuxedo pockets, and.

The other boy snorted, bent over and arranged the thing so the hood was hooked over Bruce’s head and the front trailing down his back, tied the long floppy arms around his shoulders so it became a sort of cape. “Thank you,” Bruce said again. Not like he was talking about a BB gun this time.

The boy made a humming sort of sound and crouched down again. “I’ll want it back, jus’ so you know,” he said, and Bruce nodded. Of course. Definitely. He took a small breath, and dipped his fingers back into the blood.

Another small scrape came near his ear, and when he looked up the boy had lit another match. He was holding it up in one hand and still had the book it had come from in the other, and Bruce realized that the first matches hadn’t been wood, either. They were cardboard. “Go ahead,” the boy whispered. (Where had he put the knife?) “Keep looking.”

Bruce closed his eyes for a second. Nodded. Kept looking.

It was easier with the light, and harder. Easier because he could see the pearls, at least a little, but harder because he could see when there were no more in the blood around him, could see the ones just out of reach, and he tucked the ends of the boy’s sleeves into the front of his tuxedo jacket so they wouldn't trail on the ground and crawled forward for them. Found one nestled against his father’s ear like an Easter Egg hidden in the back garden (and Mom and Dad still thought he believed in the Easter Bunny but Alfred was keeping it secret that he’d guessed) and held his breath as he eased it out without touching. Changed his mind, suddenly, and brought his hand down to cup against the back of Dad’s neck, the way the other boy had clasped him.

Dad was all the way cold, and another shiver spread up Bruce in spite of the hoodie. He snatched his hand back.

He found several that had rolled all the way to the wall, and one that had rolled up into the narrow space between two trash cans.

“Last one,” the boy whispered as he lit one more match, and Bruce kept looking until it was almost burned down but found no more lost pearls. He was sure there were others, but he’d have to move the bodies, and…no. No, no, no.

He used the last of the light to go back, kneel down between the other boy and his mother.

“My name is Bruce,” he whispered, when the dark had closed in again.

The red-and-white, knives-and-matches, it’s-real-I’m-sorry boy pressed his shoulder against Bruce’s, just for a second. His weight angled down onto Bruce because squatting on his heels made him a little higher up. “I’m Jason.”

“Jason,” Bruce repeated. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Sure I do,” Jason disagreed. Then, after Bruce had listened to him breathing a little louder than before for several breaths, he whispered, “I never killed nobody before.”

“You were so fast, I thought,” Bruce said, and swallowed the rest of it.

“Yeah, I know. I just. You looked so small.”

Bruce felt small. Smaller than he’d ever been before in his life, even though he knew he’d been growing steadily since he was born. The world was bigger and emptier than it used to be. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be alive.

“It wasn’t fair,” Jason muttered. “You were so small. I just. I got this knife. And I was too small to wrestle him. Or. Because he had a gun.”

Bruce bumped their shoulders again. Jason didn't rock from the impact, and Bruce was probably imagining he could feel that he was warm through five layers of cloth, but all the same he was definitely alive. “It’s okay, Jason,” he whispered. “You did okay. You saved me. Thank you.”

He wasn’t sure he cared about surviving. But at least the man hadn’t gotten away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: None of the archive warnings exactly apply, but a pair of fresh corpses are a physical and emotional centrepiece of the story, and a nine-year-old non-graphically cuts somebody's throat about six hundred words in.
> 
> This will probably be continued, but at the moment I have no idea for how long.


	2. i am the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this has been on hiatus a lot longer than intended! Whoops! Haha bet no one thought it was getting a second chapter ever. :}

Police got there before any _bad people_.

An adult would have been able to say it wasn’t surprising; the neighborhood might be headed sharply downhill, but northern Park Row was still a nerve center of Gotham’s non-red-light entertainment district, and there were still a lot of tourists and uptown folks strolling around feeling safe when they really shouldn’t.

A lot of residents not yet jaded enough to not bother calling in a trio of gunshots. A lot of police, patrolling not _too_ far away.

The flashing lights scintillated over Bruce and Jason and dazzled them blind for a second, so that the cops as they came swarming up seemed to appear out of nowhere. “Dispatch, we’ve got a triple homicide around 300 Park,” one of them was saying, to a radio that crackled back at him.

Two of them had high-powered flashlights, and Bruce squinted into the glare and hated light, or at least this much of it. He’d seen better in the dark. “Kids,” said one of the policemen, voice hard, like maybe he was identifying them for listeners, not talking to them. Bruce hadn’t exactly been looking _forward_ to police arriving, but if he had he wouldn’t have expected them to look—were they scared? Or angry?

“Easy, now, copper,” drawled Jason, raising both hands, open-palmed and empty.

Bruce mimicked him. Maybe he shouldn’t have. Blood dripped off his hands. He was red-handed.

One of the policemen with a flashlight pulled his gun and the one who’d said ‘kids’ raised his, and Bruce’s throat closed completely at the sight of them rising, _pointing_ at him, at Jason.

It didn’t feel like being afraid, though. More like too angry to speak. Like when the teacher was _wrong_ and wouldn’t listen to him and told him to stop disrupting the class, times a million.

“Okay, kids. Just keep your hands where we can see them,” soothed the officer in front. His gun at least was pointing at the ground. Out in the street, another set of lights arrived.

“Sure, sure,” said Jason, when Bruce still couldn’t speak. He sounded calm, and he stood up nice and slow, hands still high, everything about him agreeable and obedient and still managing to sound flip and scornful and defiant.

Bruce wasn’t sure how he knew, but he realized Jason was planning to bolt. It made sense. He’d killed a person. The knife was probably in his pocket and definitely had his fingerprints. It wasn’t fair, because he’d only done it to save Bruce, but the cops might not get that. So of course he wanted to run. Bruce should have _made_ him leave before. He would have been _fine,_ staying alone. It was _his_ parents.

If Jason tried to run away, they might shoot him.

No way he was going to watch anybody he cared about get shot, ever again.

“Bruce Wayne,” he said sharply, loudly, standing up. He untied Jason’s sweatshirt, not caring anymore if he got blood on the sleeves, bundled it off and shoved it back at its owner without looking. More than one policeman did a double take at his tuxedo, and the guns sank further. “I’m Bruce Wayne, and these are my parents. That man shot them.”

He pointed. It wasn’t even a man, anymore. Just a crumpled thing. “He was going to kill me, too, but my friend here helped. Don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt him.”

 _Please_ hurt coming out, but it was worth it. He owed Jason, had to fight for him with everything he had, and right now his best weapon was his age, and what Alfred called his _stature_ , which he had never understood until now, until the way Jason’s voice had scraped over _your killing dog_ and the way the police had lowered their weapons at the sight of his neat little bespoke suit.

“Hey, now, of course we’re not going to hurt him, son,” said one officer—he was one whose flashlight was pointed at the ground, who hadn’t taken his gun out at all, and one of the others snapped,

“Shut up, Gordon.”

“With respect, Lieutenant, I think we can handle a couple of elementary-school kids without holding them at gunpoint. And,” he lowered his voice but Bruce could still hear him, “if that’s really Thomas and Martha Wayne, you’re threatening a gun crimes victim who just inherited billions.”

The look on the lieutenant’s face was like fear, and his gun came down. Bruce turned toward Jason at once, to find that he’d slung the sweatshirt over his own shoulders and gone back to holding his open hands out to both sides, stealing glances between Bruce and the police. Bruce didn’t know him well enough to guess what the look on his face meant.

Had he heard what Gordon said? Did he realize it meant Bruce might be able to protect him, or did he think it meant he wouldn’t really try?

“It’s going to be okay,” Bruce promised. Which was such a lie, with Mom and Dad dead at his feet, but. But when the worst possible thing had happened, Jason had been there. He had to help him.

The look Jason shot back at him was tense and puzzled and sort of annoyed, like maybe he thought being reassuring was _his_ job and Bruce was butting in.

“I’m coming over there,” said the cop called Gordon, before he did. He tried to step around the blood but he couldn’t, really, when his goal was clearly touching Mom and Dad, and then their killer. He made a face when he reached for the side of the murderer’s neck, and Bruce realized he’d been going for a place Jason had opened with his knife, and realized at the last second before he touched the cut. “All three dead on the scene,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the lieutenant impatiently. “Stop messing things up for forensics and get the kids out.”

Gordon looked at Bruce before he stood up, then over at Jason. “You ready to come with us?” he asked.

It was the fact that he’d looked at Jason too that did it. Bruce’s fists closed tighter, drying blood tacky where skin tried to shift against skin, and nodded.

They let Gordon lift them across the edge of the blood pool even though it was too late to keep them out of it, and he gave Bruce a pat between the shoulder blades after he set him down. “Come on,” he said. “This way.”

Bruce turned to look back at his parents as the policeman led them out of the alleyway, and Jason and Gordon both waited for him. Finally, he turned away.

The police separated Bruce and Jason to ask them what had happened, but when Bruce started to get upset about it, they stopped before they lost sight of each other. That meant that when Bruce got to the part where Jason jumped out of the pile of cardboard, he had already heard Jason say that he tried to make the man drop his gun, so he made it sound like the time between when Jason jumped and when the man fell took a little longer than he remembered. It had been long enough for the light to get shot out. Jason probably _had_ wrestled with the man, it was just…Bruce didn’t want there to be any doubt, was all.

During the questions they gave him a blanket, which wasn’t bloody and didn’t smell like garbage but wasn’t as good as the hoodie anyway. He dropped it on the ground as soon as the people asking the questions stopped paying attention. Maybe somebody else who lived in the garbage would find it.

Bruce got into the police car when Officer Gordon asked him to, and didn’t realize he maybe shouldn’t have until he saw Jason balk. After that, he noticed there weren’t any handles on the inside of the doors, but Jason was already throwing his shoulders back and his chin up and climbing in next to him.

“It’ll be alright, son,” Gordon said, before he closed the door on them and got in the front seat.

The policeman driving the car turned it on, and Bruce looked over at Jason. There was a closed window between the front and the back of the car that made the back seat seem more private than they usually did, like they’d been given their own room. (Or locked in a cell together. Bruce had _definitely_ noticed there weren’t any handles on the inside of the doors, and wasn’t likely to stop noticing.)

“Jason?” he whispered.

“Did—do you—” Jason, who’d been so confident and firm in the dark surrounded by death, was having a hard time putting a sentence together. He looked small in the backseat, his feet hanging above the floor—closer to it than Bruce’s, but nowhere near touching. Bruce wished one of them had sat in the middle, so he could lean over and bump their shoulders again.

“You’re really rich?” Jason settled for blurting. Then didn’t give Bruce a chance to answer. “I mean, you were picking up all those pearls, I guess they were real ones, huh? I guess I should’ve figured.” The way he said it—there was a tight grin on his lips, but he didn’t sound just annoyed with himself for not guessing something, it was worse than that.

“Dad always says— _said_ that money isn’t worth anything except what good you can accomplish with it,” Bruce said.

“That’s the kind of thing only people who have too much money get to say,” Jason told him. He didn’t sound angry, and normally Bruce might have considered getting angry himself, because that was his father’s opinion that had just gotten disrespected, but he was too tired now.

He decided he didn’t care how babyish it looked, and pulled his legs up so he could put his face on his knees.

“…shit,” Jason muttered. “Listen. Bruce. We’re in the back of a cop car. I’m in some real goddamn trouble here. So if that money is good for accomplishing things, see if it can keep me outta jail, huh?”

Bruce had realized his knees were as tacky with blood as his hands, maybe worse, and scrubbed the inside of his elbow across his forehead trying to get it clean again. “They don’t send kids to jail. Do they?”

“They send ‘em to _kid jail._ I mean, no matter what they’re not going to let me just _leave_ , but if they send me to a shit foster home I can always run away.”

Bruce guessed he’d known Jason didn’t have anywhere to go home to. Still. “You were living in the trash _on purpose?_ ”

Jason flushed. “I don’t _live_ in the goddamn—I got a place. I just couldn’t get back there tonight because some guys have it out for me, and they were watching the street. I just had to lay low a couple of days and it’d blow over.” He swung his heels into the front of the seat, making tiny muffled thuds. “Not so good at keeping my head down. Obviously.”

“Do you like where you live?”

“Uh…” The look Jason shot him was weird, sideways and thoughtful. Deciding why Bruce was asking, maybe. “It’s pretty good, four walls and a roof and all of ‘em dry. Like I said, I don’t _live_ in the garbage, kid, I was just napping there.”

“I believe you,” Bruce said, even though he thought it had made _perfect sense_ for him to think Jason lived where he’d been sleeping.

Still. When he was bragging about home being an _actual room_ it made Bruce feel almost _bad_ about his room at home, with action figures lined up along the back of the desk and so many toys in the chest under the window there were some he’d never played with at all, and his favorite books on the shelf over the bed, and the stuffed dog hidden behind the wardrobe because he was too old for it but it seemed mean to get rid of it yet, and his bed with Grey Ghost sheets.

He suddenly wanted to be there, so he could hide under the covers and wake up the next morning and it could all have been a nightmare. Except it wasn’t. He knew that.

Home suddenly didn’t seem as comforting.

Home, which wouldn’t exactly be _empty_ now, because there was Mrs. Rochefort who cooked most dinners and Judy and Anna who came in to clean, and Alfred, but. Home where his parents were supposed to be, and he’d be able to go from room to room to room to room forever, looking for them, and they’d never ever be there again.

There were so many rooms you could imagine they’d always just left the one you were in. But they wouldn’t have. Mom wasn’t ever going to be in the music room playing piano. Dad wasn’t ever going to be in the study studying papers. They weren’t ever going to sit together reading, or play Scrabble with him in the evenings, or cards, or sit at dinner and try to make him think of something interesting he’d learned at school today. He would get to go home after this and _his parents wouldn’t be there._

He wondered if Jason’s place with four dry walls was the same as where he’d lived with his mom, before she died. Looked over, and noticed Jason was wearing his red hoodie knotted around _his_ shoulders now. It looked like a cape, and there was a big dark stain on one side where Bruce had grabbed it to give it back.

“Do you want to come live with me?” he asked. It came out small and raspy enough, and Jason blinked at him confused enough, that he tried again, louder. His hands rubbed together, and in some places the blood stuck but around the edges it had dried out and sifted over his knees in powder. “You should come stay with me. My house is too big.”

Jason laughed at that, a weird confused little sound like air bubbling up through water.

“My house is too big for _one person,_ ” Bruce clarified, and that made Jason stop laughing at least.

“I don’t think they’ll let me,” said Jason. “But…thanks.” Bruce frowned, and Jason gave a sigh. “You’re killin’ me here, kid. Look, if they stick me somewhere I can get out of, I’ll hike out and stop by, how’s that? If you still want to by then you can loan me a room, have me over for lunch, whatever.”

Bruce’s teeth hurt. “What do you mean _if I still want to?_ ” he asked. “I’m not a little kid, I don’t just— _say_ things! I thought we were _friends_.” Which was a stupid thing to say, or think, when they’d just met tonight, when everything was awful.

“…having somebody move into your house is a little much for new friends.”

“It’s a big house,” Bruce repeated. Folded his arms, tucking his cold bloody hands under them. “And anyway, you saved my life, right? I owe you.” He swallowed, and looked out the window. He wasn’t tall enough to see down to sidewalk level, which was good because it meant he didn’t have to look at people, just theatre marquee and windows with the blinds shut. “Whatever. I guess I’ll figure out how to make police not send somebody to jail.”

“…the puppy face worked pretty well earlier,” offered Jason. “What do rich kids learn that kind of face for? Getting away with joy-riding in the family jet? Going on vacation to Europe?”

Bruce snorted. “Why would we have our own _jet._ ” And he didn’t really care about vacations. Maybe by the time you were grown up home was boring. Though Dad always said there were no boring subjects only boring people, but Mom didn't agree that Dad managed to make the phylogeny of mold interesting, especially at dinner.

He bit his tongue hard so he wouldn't start crying again about  _slime mold._ “…mostly I guess to get extra dessert, I dunno.” He did know, though. His throat was all closed up again and he bit his tongue some more because it worked. “And…to get my parents to spend time with me.”

Jason was quiet for a second longer than normal. “…fuck.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POV shift next chapter.


	3. i am your shadow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a bit different! POV switch. ^^;

Jason Todd, nine years of age and a Gotham native, had only spent the four months since his mother’s death on the streets, but reading between the lines he had been sliding that way since far earlier, as the woman’s health and general fitness as caretaker declined. Slinking through Gotham’s alleys, jostling its tourists, and pocketing whatever wasn’t adequately nailed down.

The boy seemed like a throwback to an earlier time, before all children who were wards of no one in particular had become formally wards of the state. When urchins whose parents were dead or incompetent to care for them had thronged the streets of every major metropolis—in England, legally left to the care of the Crown from time immemorial, but practically speaking in the charge of no-one.

The boy squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw and squinted his eyes, and one almost expected to hear a Depression-era Brooklyn drawl pour from between his lips, or even the thick see-sawing vowels of the Victorian Cockney. A sort of anachronistic Artful Dodger, dropped out of a fictional world onto Gotham’s worn bitumen.

But he was perfectly real. Perfectly deadly.

Despite having gone to considerable effort to arrange for it to be so, Alfred Pennyworth did not want this boy in the house.

He was aware the child had very likely saved Master Bruce’s life. He was aware the child had no home of his own. He was aware that his young charge was clinging to the other child like a shipwrecked man to a shard of flotsam.

That last was, in a way, the problem.

Because this boy had knifed a man to death, and even if it that act meant they owed Todd a life and even if it had been ruled justifiable homicide, that was _not_ an example or an influence Alfred wanted for young Bruce. This was not the sort of friend Mrs. Wayne would have wanted for her son.

Several times, he had almost said something to that effect. But he knew his feelings would only be interpreted as prejudice regarding the boy’s background, and…there was no use in expressing himself only to further alienate his ward.

“I’m telling you, bro, he’s got it in for me,” Todd had told Bruce in their lair under the dining table, a week into his stay.

Alfred had held his position in the hallway outside, breath silent. Listening at doors was not the act of a gentleman, but it had long been the purview of the servant. “Thinks I’m gonna poison his tea and steal the silver any second.”

“You couldn’t even carry all the silver, Jason,” Bruce retorted. He only ever smiled now when he was alone with Todd, which should have been counted to the child’s credit but some days seemed as though he was stealing every scrap of recovery Master Bruce was capable of for his _own_ benefit. Alfred worried that at this rate, his charge would become unable to function at all without the other boy’s support.

“Khhh, bragging about your bling does not actually make you cool, that is a lie spread by the music industry. Listen, Iceman is your legal guardian now, right? I’m pretty sure he can get rid of me.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, he’s still being paid his salary…I own the house, so I get to decide whether you can stay.” Bruce’s voice from under the tablecloth went stretched and wet, as it always did when he thought about his own horribly early inheritance. Little more than two weeks was not nearly long enough to adjust to his new reality.

As it happened, he was wrong. Alfred did, technically, have the authority as trustee of the estate and the legal guardian with full physical custody to determine on Master Bruce’s behalf whether Jason Todd could remain here. He had _certainly_ had the freedom to refuse to file for even the temporary custody order under which Mister Todd was currently staying. He was honestly hoping the courts ultimately decided to reject their second application for long-term guardianship, much as he would hate to see his charge alone in this vast house.

But he was not so convinced of the boy’s inimical qualities as to be willing to lose Master Bruce’s trust forever, just to be rid of him.

He did not, in fact, expect Jason Todd to steal the silver, or anything else they were likely to notice missing. He was obviously intelligent, and advanced for his age, and intending to make the most of his good fortune for as long as it lasted.

But he did not trust the boy, and he had not taken many pains to hide it.

And if it twisted something in his chest to hear that his ward thought of him more as employee than caretaker…well. Eavesdroppers never heard any good of themselves. He had made his own bed. He would lie in it for as long as he was needed.

* * *

Jason Todd had arrived on the doorstep of Wayne Manor ten days after his knife ended the life of one Joseph Chill. He’d taken the city bus as far as it went and then walked what Alfred later calculated to have been five and a half miles, most of it uphill in the dark, to slip between the bars of the fence across the front of the Wayne property.

Then, made his way up the drive to knock on the front door.

The manor’s brass door-knocker had not seen much use since the installation, some years ago, of an intercom system to the front gate; the rapping sound barely carried to the kitchen where Alfred had been putting together breakfast, and even then took him a little while to identify.

He stripped off his apron and hurried to the front door, feeling harassed and suspicious—the most likely suspects to have circumvented security were ambulance-chasing paparazzi looking to bully their way in and acquire exclusive information about young Bruce’s bereavement, but his young ward’s paranoia was understandable, and catching, and he could not dismiss the possibility of opportunistic murder inspired by recent events.

The unexpected guest turned out, when the door swung open, to be only barely tall enough to reach the door-knocker.

“Hey,” said Jason Todd, staring up through his messily curling fringe, a plastic grocery bag slung over one shoulder presumably containing all his worldly possessions, “my caseworker called and said I live here now.”

It was rude of Alfred to stand stock-still in the doorway, but it had been rude of Mr. Todd to so anticipate his invitation, and thoroughly baffling that he’d managed it, so there was some excuse. “Master Bruce and I would have fetched you in a few hours once the custody order was in hand,” he pointed out as the surprise wore off.

Todd shrugged. This wasn’t their first meeting, but it was the first occasion they’d had to actually speak to one another. Bruce had introduced them only absently, some days earlier, when Jason climbed into the rear of the car to be driven to a restaurant lunch, for which Alfred had not joined them.

“You want I should walk myself back to Ma Gunn’s?”

“No, of course not.” Alfred stepped back, the door swinging wide. “Please, come in.”

* * *

Bruce had come up to him in the pantry two days after the funeral, which had been three days after the deaths.

“Did you know that in America it’s ten thousand percent more likely for a child to be killed by foster parents than by a parent they’re actually related to?”

Alfred could only stare, for a moment, the fifteen-pound sack of flour he’d been in the act of emptying into the glass flour bin weighing awkwardly in his hands until he lowered it to the shelf to be dealt with later.

Jason Todd had been transferred from protective police custody to a foster placement the previous morning, once the police felt reasonably secure that the Wayne murders had not been a premeditated assassination, or connected with organized crime, and thus the boy should be safe from retaliation. He should have anticipated this angle. “Where did you read that?”

“A book in Dad’s study, why would you even _ask_ that?” Bruce scowled, offended at having his accuracy questioned on data meant to prove his goals were of paramount importance, and Jason Todd’s need for rescue of overwhelming urgency.

The boy was unlikely, at this point, to be charged with any crimes, but that was evidently insufficient comfort to the young gentleman.

Alfred replaced the funnel into the mouth of the flour bin and resumed pouring. “It’s important to be able to cite the source of any statistic used to support an argument, since they are very easily made up.” And sounded that way even if they weren’t, when they contained figures like ‘ten thousand.’ _Lies, damned lies, and statistics._ He knew better than to think Bruce Wayne would have made up his numbers, but good habits should be fostered young.

Especially now that it was almost _entirely_ up to Alfred to see that they were, good Lord.

He refocused on the child-murder statistics instead. They were slightly less alarming. “Was any figure given for stepparents?”

(For that matter, he suspected his role as a designated non-adoptive guardian not from within the foster system might not be covered by these figures at all; if it was, he was certainly included in the high-murder-risk pool.)

Master Bruce glared. “No, and it doesn’t _matter,_ because the point is that Jason is _a hundred times_ as likely to be murdered where he is now than he would be as a kid with real parents.”

Alfred rather thought the child had demonstrated a proactive inclination toward self-defense that should improve his odds immensely.

But he could hardly point this out to his young ward and expect to change his mind, nor expect it to have it accepted that murder was in fact a fairly unlikely event, even within such relatively exacerbated circumstances as foster placement. The boy’s personal experience, after all, defined unexpected murder as quite common. It had happened in one hundred percent of the lives he had lived, and for all his intellect he was only eight years old.

Alfred tapped the bottom of the empty sack to get the last of the flour to roll free, and incidentally buy himself a moment to think.

 _Where Jason Todd was now_ was, more precisely, a group home, a temporary placement they had been assured, where the air had been thick with sullen violence and the caretaker all but openly scornful of the orphan millionaire turning up in a butler-driven Bentley to take one of her charges out to lunch. It had been an improvement on the police lock-up, and presumably wherever he was sent next would be an improvement on this ‘home’ which was clearly designated to contain incorrigible children, but it certainly did not paint a pleasant picture.

“And how do you suppose his chances stand,” Alfred asked, setting the empty sack aside and lifting the funnel from the bin, “relative to his prior abode in Crime Alley?”

“That’s not the point either, that’s not an _option_ anymore. He’s in more danger than he would be _with us._ ” Bruce’s eyes did not fill with tears and his jaw remained clenched and firm, and the deep anger that had been flashing in him since the murders rose up again, but it was the brightness in the eyes Alfred read, and the way the teeth locked together against weakness as he said, “He saved me. We can’t leave him there.”

In the face of this lucidity and moral conviction—and even if they thought to do this sort of research, how many eight-year-olds would effortlessly express a relative figure alternately in percentile and multiplicative terms?—Alfred could hardly demur further.

He could have pointed out that he and Dr. Thompkins had not actually entirely secured Bruce’s guardianship yet, that there were hearings to get through and it was therefore not reasonable to expect to further expedite their approval for a specific non-standard foster placement, but that would have been disingenuous. Bruce was not asking him for guarantees. He was asking for his _support._

Alfred pressed the rubber-sealed glass lid into place.

“I will do all I can,” he promised.

And with that, he set out to exploit every loophole and opportunity afforded by Social Services’ many vulnerabilities: to sentiment, and class prejudice, and old-fashioned blackmail. He had been prepared to resort to bribery, but the plain unsuitability his private investigators uncovered in a broad range of existing placements had provided him with sufficient leverage. Mister Todd’s current locale _alone_ had seen three deaths over the past fifteen years.

Doctor Wayne's books evidently had fairly good data about the American childcare system. He always had been particular about information.

* * *

The medical reports showed death by gunshot wound. No surprise there.

It had been quick, at least, for both of them—this was little consolation considering it provoked the thought that if it had been slow, there would have been opportunity for Bruce or his new friend to summon an ambulance and perhaps save their lives, but at least it _had_ been quick.

He’d been shot in the heart, she in the throat. No one had drowned in their own blood or bled out slowly into their abdominal cavity or experienced any other slow torment. Just brief terrible pain and rapid unconsciousness, followed almost immediately by death.

(Jason Todd was to steal these reports from Alfred Pennyworth’s room on the tenth day after the murders, and return them several hours later. He thought he’d gotten away with it, but in fact Alfred simply let it pass unremarked.

He _was_ angry that Master Bruce had clearly been allowed to read them as well, and just as much relieved to be spared answering any questions on the subject, and also aware, as Jason was not, that he’d had no legal business having those reports yet and couldn’t afford to draw attention to the fact that he _had_. He let it pass.)

Two coffins were purchased from the finest coffinmaker in Italy—not commissioned, there was no time for custom designs with the dead already decaying, but they were gorgeous masterpieces of woodworking, and the mortician had disguised the violent cause of death and left the corpses looking as serenely grim as though they had passed in their sleep after illness.

It didn’t suit them. On Thomas at least the expression was believable; he was rarely angry and it rarely lasted long when he was, but the forbidding expression on his corpse was not unlike his actual anger.

Martha on the other hand had been accustomed to rave and fuss when thwarted, and able to sustain a fume long beyond its natural lifespan and be lit from within as if by fire for as long as it persisted, and the sculpted contempt made her features all but unrecognizable.

Bruce wanted to have her buried in the pearls, her favorite pretty thing, his father’s first gift to her when they were young (they would never now grow old), but the police didn’t give them back in time. When they were returned Alfred restrung them anyway, at his young master’s (ward’s) request, all the ones Master Bruce had gathered up and the ones the police had taken from under the bodies and inside the murderer’s hand.

The string was one short. Alfred said nothing.

* * *

No one informed Alfred of what had happened for nearly five hours after the fact.

So far as he could determine, the decision-making process of the police had progressed something like, ‘since both halves of the couple are dead, there’s no point in calling their house.’ It was after midnight when some bright bulb realized—or finally made their blockheaded superiors aware—that they were going to need to put the child somewhere eventually and none of his relatives had as yet put themselves forward.

(The Kanes scrambled for guardianship once the news broke, but Martha Wayne’s will was so firmly set against her family having any opportunity for custody of her son in the event of her death that they were stymied, and Bruce’s remaining blood relations were too far removed to have any claim by statute and by and large lost interest, once it became clear that Alfred Pennyworth’s position as trustee of the fortune would persist regardless of any decisions regarding Bruce’s custody.

Doctor Leslie Thompkins turned out to be surprisingly deft at navigating family court proceedings. Alfred would probably have managed, but they were lucky to have her, and not just because the judge seemed more comfortable awarding custody jointly to a woman and a man, even if they were not attached to one another in any other manner.)

Apparently it was common, though not precisely legal, to house underaged witnesses with members of the department in the short term.

This option had in Bruce's case been rejected, belatedly, on the basis of the high-profile nature of the case, and also on the basis of the fact that the young master had stood up on a chair to make him tall enough to shout into adult faces for the purpose of insisting that he wouldn’t leave the police station unless Jason could come, too.

(This Alfred learned later, from one of the detectives in charge of the case expostulating in frustration. The main source of this frustration was that the importance of the victims had landed this open-and-shut case on him as a detective and he wasn’t being allowed to close it until _something_ had been investigated.

The obvious target was the surviving killer from the whole catastrophe, but the optics of prosecuting a nine-year-old for saving an eight-year-old from an adult murderer would be terrible. The DA flatly refused; it was an election year.)

At the time, Alfred was simply woken from his sleep in the small hours of the morning by the telephone—the police had called the chairman of the WE Board of Directors, who had put them in contact with Thomas Wayne’s personal attorney, who had informed them after some discussion that the person they wanted to contact actually lived in Wayne Manor.

No one had apparently seen fit to ask Bruce himself who they ought to call, or if they had he had refused to answer.

In spite of it having been his free evening, Alfred felt obscurely guilty for having turned in half an hour before the Waynes would have been expected home, since they’d planned to dine out after the film. They’d already been dead by then, of course, but he still felt he’d been somehow remiss.

Master Bruce looked tiny and miserable and groggy when Alfred rushed in, jacket and tie both entirely absent and his shirt-cuffs rolled up, to conceal that he had also neglected cufflinks.

The newly orphaned child was curled up in an uncomfortable-looking orange plastic chair which seemed to share design principles with subway seats. Someone had given him the opportunity to wash his hands since the murders, but the white cuffs of his little linen shirt were stained dark with blood that had dried a familiar terrible rusty brown, and there were flecks and daubs of it across his face and neck and shirt-collar. And actually everything he was wearing, but it barely showed up against the black. Alfred simply knew what to look for.

“Alfred,” Bruce said.

He wasn’t small for his age. He never had been. But when Alfred went to one knee beside the hideous orange chair it was less than sixty pounds of weight that flung itself against his chest. Hot tears soaked straight through the shoulder of his waistcoat and into his shirt, but little Bruce wasn’t making a sound. His breath hardly hitched.

Alfred’s left arm came up to fold around Bruce’s shoulders and instinctively cup the back of his head, as if he were still an infant. With less confidence, his right hand patted the young master’s arm. He wasn’t entirely unpracticed at offering consolation, but he felt utterly inadequate to it on this scale.

He’d held children—this child mostly—with scraped knees and broken toys, and adults breaking apart under the weight of grief, but the keening need of a child in the grips of true heartbreak was unspeakable.

Bruce cried himself out and fell asleep in Alfred’s arms, and Alfred gathered him close and signed the necessary forms one-handed, until he was free to take the child home and tuck him safely into his own bed to sleep away a little of the pain.

All the while, he barely took notice of the other small boy, wearing badly worn oversized blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, watching him like a hawk. It didn’t even occur to him that the scruffy child had anything to do with the Wayne murder case, and if it had he wouldn’t have expected it to be in any more significant capacity than as a coincidental witness.

In retrospect, he had been uncharacteristically uninquisitive, but at the time all that had mattered was knowing that his employers were definitely dead, their son was physically unharmed, and there was no definite expectation that their murderer or any associate could pose any further threat, if no certainty that they wouldn't. And that he was the party on record as Bruce’s designated guardian, in case this day should ever come.

Everything else, he’d felt, could wait.

He’d almost forgotten the other child’s existence by the time he put Bruce to bed; he’d spent more attention at the time on how having run out half-dressed had robbed him of much of the armor of respectability he needed to deal with the police. The way Master Bruce was clinging to him had probably made up for it, in terms of how trustworthy he seemed, but his air of authority had suffered.

Then Bruce had woken up. Alfred had managed to be there, at least, seated at his bedside, prepared to offer comfort again when brief, blissful ignorance was succeeded rapidly by horrified realization. He was not prepared for these stages of awakening to grief to be followed immediately by demands to know where ‘Jason’ was and what had happened to him, and insistence on going back to the police station _immediately_.

He was too old for this.

* * *

Alfred Pennyworth was presently forty-one years old. He had been on the stage from age fifteen to twenty-two, when Her Majesty’s Secret Service had visited upon him an invitation it would have been difficult to refuse even if, as a brash young man, he had not been thrilled at the chance.

Ten years later, he had gotten out, sick to death of the isolation and exhaustion of secrecy, of blood, and of double-dealing for a cause he believed in less every day…just in time to learn that his father was dying.

Well, he’d gone to him of course. They were one another’s last family, even if they’d never been close or precisely gotten along. And of course the old man had had a _completely absurd_ deathbed request: his employers of the last twelve years, the Waynes (who had hired him at twice his old pay, because of the excellent references given by the now-bankrupted British household that had absorbed all Jarvis Pennyworth’s time and attention from Alfred’s earliest memories) were apparently completely helpless on their own, incapable of managing their own staff or, to hear his father tell it, finding their own feet to put socks on. And the lady of the house was pregnant.

 _Please, look after them, my boy,_ Jarvis had sighed from his deathbed, to the son he believed had spent the last decade performing dull clerical work for the British Government. _Just until things are settled after the child, until there is time to find a proper replacement._

He had met the nascent objections just beginning to rise from the congealed mud of Alfred’s abject astonishment with a gentle, weary little smile and the words, _I have every faith in your capability, my boy._

As a child, Alfred had been expected to go into service when he grew up, as though it was still 1880 and the servant class large and strong and inescapable. He’d received more training than any child wanted or needed in household tasks and household economy—not that they hadn’t all been valuable life skills for looking after oneself, in one way or another, but that had never been the intent, and he’d known it.

Going onto the stage had been a rebellion, yes, but also a loyalty to his own passions, and a search for himself, which MI5 had seemed to further facilitate but probably only rudely interrupted.

He’d once played an ambitious young butler in a West End revival of a nineteenth-century _picaresque._ The critics had lauded him. This clearly qualified him to run someone else’s household full of unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar country.

On the other hand, both his careers thus far had taught him mastery of improvisation, and if he did make a giant bollocks of things, it would serve the old bulldog right.

And all else aside, he could hardly refuse what amounted to a last request, so he’d swallowed his laughter and his rage both, left the old man languishing, and reported to the pretentiously entitled (if architecturally impressive) Wayne Manor.

The Waynes had turned out to be less incompetent than advertised but still impressively helpless—Alfred never saw the need to provide maps to the locations of their feet, but occasionally it seemed it might be necessary to draw up diagrams explaining such concepts as ‘food takes time to cook’ and ‘the staff cannot immediately provide you with items we do not physically possess.’

They never got angry about failure to instantly do the impossible, however, not even Mrs. Wayne in the throes of bizarre pregnancy cravings, merely mildly surprised, as though Jarvis could _certainly_ have managed it and, even though they had accepted Alfred’s substitution with the same bemused half-hilarity with which he had offered it, they were entirely puzzled that he could not produce the same miracles.

This inadvertent flag of challenge made Alfred throw himself into his new (temporary) responsibilities with all the more determination, until by the time his father actually died two months in, he scarcely noticed. At least, that was what he’d told himself. He had been _irritated_ when Martha Wayne insisted he take the day off after the news arrived, and when he realized this meant he was turning into his father spent the unlooked-for free hours considering the merits of getting uproariously drunk. In the end he just arranged the funeral.

He’d gone back the next day, anyway.

The rest of the staff were mostly capable of managing themselves, and considering his blatant inexperience he wouldn’t dream of meddling with the dusting rotas or the dinner, which had a professional cook in every evening the Waynes didn’t go out, even those nights when the master of the house was out until all hours working at the hospital.

(Alfred had looked into this, because he was naturally nosy and a trained spy; so far as he could tell, Thomas Wayne _actually was_ working late, at his job, every time. Even very rich young doctors had unreasonable expectations piled on them, it seemed.)

He was still helpful around the place, and also a figure of authority in case an actual decision needed to be made in the absence of the good doctor and his wife, and as long as this was his job he was determined to do it properly, as he had every job ever given him. (He was beginning to feel everyday less like he was _impersonating_ a butler and more like he actually was one.)

The Waynes attended Jarvis Pennyworth’s funeral, Martha hugely pregnant and wiping away discreet tears with a black lace handkerchief that matched her gown, and he suspected their grief was rather more sincere than his own, if less…intense. Certainly far less complicated. Jarvis Pennyworth had been a master of his craft, and easily able to be whatever his employers needed, and the Waynes needed to be _liked_ as much as looked-after.

Alfred wasn’t his father. He thought he might like the couple, anyway.

Thomas was several years younger than he, and seemed younger still, being only two years out of school while Alfred had been earning his own bread for sixteen. _I’d known your father since I was still in high school,_ he told Alfred once, as if he felt he needed to justify being upset at the man’s death in the face of Alfred’s stoicism.

 _I’d barely spoken to him since_ I _was in upper school,_ Alfred had not actually replied. _Which I never even finished,_ he certainly didn’t add.

‘The family’ to Jarvis Pennyworth had always meant his employers, never his wife or son. Alfred had thought he was long over being bitter.

Then the child had been born, with all the excitement attendant to any birth and all the extra dramatics that came with the advent of an only heir to a large fortune. At least one cousin hanging about was clearly hoping something would go wrong and give him a better chance at getting a large piece of the fortune, should something ill befall the Waynes senior. Alfred took an uncommon satisfaction in shutting doors in their faces whenever possible.

Having safely arrived, the baby was none of his affair, really, until it learned to escape its crib at the tender age of ten months, and then he seemed to be constantly tracking it down and returning it to its mother or nurse. When the little heir cut his first sharp little teeth, the first hand he managed to sink them into was Alfred’s.

Miss Satchley, being a trained childcare professional who knew how to avoid such things, laughed uproariously at him.

He began to stop outside the nursery, every evening, when he patrolled the house looking for anything amiss before going to bed, and listen for the sound of small lungs breathing. Occasionally he and Thomas Wayne met each other there, long after sunset when the master of the house slunk in well past bedtime looking rueful at having missed his evening window for familial interaction for the second time in a week.

Usually they exchanged nods in silence, before Alfred walked on and Thomas lingered, listening to his baby’s breath, or even went inside to watch him sleeping. (This was a risky proposition, as Master Bruce was a remarkably light sleeper, but he was still young enough to wake in the night quite often anyway, and if Thomas preferred to hush and cuddle his son back to sleep before going to bed himself, that was his own affair.)

“Alfred,” Thomas said to him once, as he was walking away. He stopped, and turned. “Thank you. For taking care of us. You’re here for my family when I should be.”

“It’s my job, Mister Wayne,” Alfred pointed out.

And somehow, seven years after that, it still was. Here he still was. No longer awkward or uncertain as a butler, even in his mind, though it was nothing he had ever wanted as a child. He had thought that he’d leave when it came to ten years, the same span as he’d given his last career. Maybe look for something to do that _didn’t_ demand he pour out a hundred and ten percent of himself into every endeavor, if he could figure out how to live that way.

But now there would be no leaving; he had been thrust into at least ten more years of responsibility and he could not even think of abandoning this duty.

Bruce scarcely knew Doctor Thompkins, and she kept odd hours and could barely fry an egg. It was good to have her as backup, but she couldn’t be expected to serve as primary caretaker. Miss Satchley’s employment had been only for eight hours a day and ended when Bruce enrolled in pre-kindergarten. If Alfred disclaimed him, Master Bruce would be left in the hands of distant relatives whose primary concern would be finagling access to his money, or else the state.

There had been a hundred men who could take his place for England. In this place, there was not one.

Alfred Pennyworth was here to stay.

And so, he was obligated to acknowledge, was Jason Todd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...also reverse chronological order. :}
> 
> Alfred's life story is _weird_ , okay, even condensing out as many bizarre subplots as possible, and got weirder in 1987 when he was retconned into having brought Bruce up. This also made Alfred's canon-though-mostly-subtext daddy issues link directly to Bruce's issues, which link to the Robins' issues, so technically some of Tim Drake's neuroses can be blamed on Jarvis Pennyworth. _Families,_ man.
> 
> Please consider, DC's sliding timescale means at this point Alfred was probably a teenager in the _60s_. He was certainly born after WWII. Vast chunks of his characterization have grown starkly anachronistic, attitudes and behaviors that attached themselves to the stock character of The Butler circa 1920 if not earlier. 
> 
> His acting career has always been canon, though (even as DC has randomly changed their minds about whether he was a spy or an army ranger or what), leaving me with the marvelous and fantastically creepy impression that Alfred _has been in-character as The Butler for over thirty years._ He is in no position to lecture Bruce about being consumed by the Batman.


End file.
